This morning’s shootings at an Arizona university and last week’s shootings on a college campus in Oregon are an example of the anger constantly on the minds of education officials in Georgia.
They are taking steps here to protect students, as threats rise.
One national study found school threats increased by 158 percent during the first five months of the 2014 school year compared to the same time period in 2013. Georgia ranked 13th among states with the highest number of threats.
The majority of last year's spike were not "traditional" threats like the tip — which proved unfounded — Cobb County police got last Friday, that a middle school student had threatened to "shoot up" a school. Instead, most came via electronic devices and social media applications, the study's authors found. Social media threats alone — commonly posted on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — accounted for 231, or 28 percent, of the 812 threats reviewed.
In recent years, many schools have taken the fight against school violence to where it many times begins: social media. Read the whole story about it on our premium website for subscribers, myajc.com.
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